Friday, September 22, 2017

Pop-Up Reading (Novick, Carter-Jones, Stiegerwald & Bauer)

Pop-Up Reading at the White Whale Bookstore
September 22, 2017

Joan Bauer curated this event around a theme of "Writing From History."  She had been introduced to the author Bill Steigerwald by an old friend of hers who had once been Bill's journalistic colleague. Bill, about whom you will learn more in a paragraph below, is the author of a recently published book titled 30 Days a Black Man. At this event Bill reads passages from the book and provides historical and biographical context. The other readers should be familiar to those of us in the Pittsburgh poetry community. 

Aaron Novick is a graduate student in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Third Wednesday, and New Orleans Review. He writes about other people's poetry at https://resistingtheintelligence.wordpress.com/  

Aaron Novick - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download

Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep (selected by Elizabeth Alexander as the 2012 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award) and the chapbook Blackberry Cobbler Song. Her chapbook Crooked Star Dream Book was named Honorable Mention for the 2013 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. Sheila taught in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and in Chatham University’s and the University of Pittsburgh’s Education Departments. She earned her BA from Carnegie Mellon University and both an M.Ed. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a fellow of Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the 2015 Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Her poetry has been published in Crossing Limits, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Pennsylvania Review, Tri-State Anthology, Riverspeak, Flights: The Literary Journal of Sinclair College, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, City Paper, Cave Canem Anthology, Jewish Currents, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, several volumes of Carlow University’s Voices from the Attic anthologies and other journals. Currently, Sheila is working on a new manuscript of poems tentatively entitled The Newly Invented Lucky Star Dream Book, as well as a long poem of book length yet to be titled and a memoir also yet to be titled.

Sheila Carter-Jones - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download 

Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book "30 Days a Black Man" tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's nationally syndicated series "In the Land of Jim Crow" exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America's legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said "30 Days a Black Man" is "a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure..." that Steigerwald turned "into rollicking, haunting American history." In 2013 he wrote and published Dogging Steinbeck which exposed the many fictions and fibs John Steinbeck put into Travels With Charley.  Before he turned to books, Steigerwald worked as an editor and writer/reporter/columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1990s and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the 2000s. He and his wife Trudi live south of Pittsburgh in the woods. 

Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Since she began writing poetry again in 2001, more than 180 of her poems have appeared in journals, anthologies and periodicals, including most recently, Calyx, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Slipstream, Uppagus, US 1 Worksheets, Voices from the Attic, and Vox Populi: A Public Sphere for Politics & Poetry.  For some years, Joan worked as an English teacher and educational counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-hosts and curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Jimmy Cvetic. 

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